ABSTRACT
The long history of the extremely unequal development and growth opportunities that have afflicted Zimbabwe’s distribution of income from the colonial Rhodesia to post independence, remains an unfinished business. The central task of the chapter is to explain the background of Zimbabwe’s economic dualism. This was the result of consistent efforts of the colonial government’s economic policies and monopoly power possessed by large-scale operators and employers of labour from the cradle of the country’s modern sector. It is also inferred that this pattern of unequal development was replicated in other similar economies of Southern Africa, particularly in the case of South Africa and Namibia. The chapter also puts into focus Zimbabwe’s geographic landscape, which in many ways determined and defined the features of communal land allocation and the latter’s relatively poor agricultural potential. It is asserted that dualism manifests itself in many ways and has long become an inherent part of the subject matter of underdevelopment, which has continued to be so well into the twenty-first century. Hence, this has continued to be a subject of interest and focus for scholarly research.
